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This can’t go on: Logging more acreage for less timber

By Roy Keene

Appeared in print: Thursday, Jan. 28, 2010, page A9

In an attempt to vindicate clear-cutting, Fred Sperry’s guest viewpoint of Jan. 17 says that “regardless of the harvest method, forest resources are protected through best management practices and regulation.”

An article published the same day in The Oregonian stated that, according to federal foresters and scientists, “Oregon doesn’t do enough to protect its coastal waterways from the harmful effects of logging.”

Claims that “Oregon’s forests are being managed by capable professionals” are ambiguous. Many of Oregon’s forests are “managed” by politicians, timber industry accountants and distant shareholders, not real foresters. Less biased federal foresters state that Oregon’s forestry program lacks adequate measures for protecting riparian and high-risk landslide areas.

With Oregon’s weak forest practice rules now threatening to cost us millions of withheld federal dollars, let’s see if the “professionals” within the Oregon Department of Forestry begin to realistically restrict clear-cutting.

Unrestricted clear-cutting has cost Oregonians salmon runs as well as their riparian habitats. A multitude of scientific studies confirm the dramatic loss of salmon in logged-over watersheds.

Unrestricted clear-cutting has also cost human lives. In 1996, when a half dozen people perished in Oregon as a direct result of clear-cut caused landslides, I lost personal friends, Rick and Susan Moon. They were swept away by a mud and logging debris torrent out of a Champion International clear-cut on a steep slope perched over their home, a preventable disaster that left their children orphaned.

I viewed the site the day it happened. Anyone with common sense could see why and how this tragedy occurred. The Oregon Department of Forestry, even after recognizing the risk, did nothing to stop or mitigate this clear-cut. Champion International, after clear-cutting a million acres in the Northwest in a single decade, left our pillaged watersheds and broken communities to log equally unprotected Third World forests.

Massive, unrestricted clear-cutting is a far cry from the small-scale logging practiced by Bob Kintigh, and described in his Dec. 7 guest viewpoint.

Take Sperry’s challenge and “see for yourself.” Google up the satellite viewer and scroll through Oregon’s Coast Range and the west Cascades. It’s shocking. Some single clear-cut units you’ll see are bigger than Kintighs entire tree farm.

The public’s resistance to clear-cutting isn’t driven by small wood lot owners, who account for less than 5 percent of Oregon’s timber harvest, but by industrial logging that strips our watersheds to produce 75 percent of the state’s annual cut. Billions of board feet of timber are clear-cut every year, even in a recession, and the better logs exported without regard for local labor.

Clear-cutting will always be the silvicultural choice for operators who are quickly and cheaply stripping forests. Gary Kutcher (guest viewpoint, Jan. 4) is trying, by mandating selective logging, to slow irresponsible forest liquidation. Hopefully his initiative will focus on forest owners of more than 1,000 acres, the ones who excused themselves from timber harvest taxes in 1999 at a to-date cost of hundreds of millions of dollars in lost revenues.

Losses from industrial tax subsidies and forest liquidation are routinely obfuscated by lumping forest ownerships together or by hiding data. For example, in 1989 Oregon Department of Forestry reported 57,000 industry clear-cut acres. Dividing the harvest volume by the number of acres cut indicated an average of 43,000 board feet per acre. In 1999 it was only 28,000 board feet per acre from 75,000 clear-cut acres. That’s a third more acres to remove almost the same volume of timber.

I commented on the fact that the industry’s trees were getting smaller and younger in support of my proposal to tax premature timber harvesting. In 2000, the ODF began hiding industry’s harvested acres.

As increasingly more acres are cut to support industry’s huge harvest volumes, more acres are poisoned with herbicides and more streams and lakes are contaminated with fertilizers that cause toxic algae blooms.

As tree size shrinks, so does forest diversity, habitat value, and employment opportunity. Many products made from these teenage “chip” trees, mixed with nasty glues and huge energy inputs, aren’t as “wise” or as “natural” an environmental choice as Sperry claims.

The myth that forests were naturally established following disturbances that were more damaging than modern-day harvest practices is untrue. Clear-cutting every 40 years is a very different disturbance from a fire burning the same site every 200 years. A century of “modern harvest practices,” not natural disturbances, has eradicated Oregon’s valuable low-elevation old growth forests, reduced salmon runs, caused species declines, and bankrupted regions such as Oregon’s North Coast.

Give us another century of unrestricted logging, and Oregonians won’t, indeed, “have to choose between protecting forest resources and clear-cutting.” Replaced by biomass plantations and fiber farms, there will be little real forest resource left. Clear waters will run perpetually murky, salmon will be extinct, and the deep tall tree groves we love to visit will be gone.

Roy Keene of Eugene is a conservationist, forester and real estate broker.